I'd like to have a word with your "naturopath". Several words. Loud, angry, threatening words.

Why? I thought IV Vitamin C was an accepted therapy for surgery recovery. It seemed a reasonable extension to try it to improve healing from injuries as well. The guy I see is a registered Naturopathic Doctor (a professional designation in Ontario) who compounded the vitamin blend specifically for CdnPaddy's state of heath and needs. We didn't find anything wierd or quackish about the therapy, except the part where it didn't actually do anything.

Eight subjects received 100,000 I.U. of vitamin D and seven subjects received phototherapy. At the onset of treatment and after 1 month of therapy subjects were administered the Hamilton Depression scale, the SIGH-SAD, and the SAD-8 depression scale. All subjects receiving vitamin D improved in all outcome measures. The phototherapy group showed no significant change in depression scale measures.

Maximum endogenous production with full body exposure to sunlight is 250 µg (10,000 IU) per day. [ ... ] dosages up to 250 micrograms (10,000 IU) /day in healthy adults are believed to be safe. [ ... ] all known cases of vitamin D toxicity with hypercalcemia have involved intake of or over 1,000 micrograms (40,000 IU)/day.

There's a growing body of evidence that the U.S. RDA (400 IU/day, just enough to prevent rickets) is an order of magnitude too low for winter. I started taking 3,000IU of Vitamin D this winter; it's treating me very, very well so far.

Originally Posted by H TO THE IZZO

Note that milk's fortified with loads of Vitamin D.

Consider the above as regards natural production in summer vs dosages in fortified foods.

Originally Posted by H TO THE IZZO

A multivitamin is intended to compensate for micronutrient inadequacies in your daily diet. If your diet usually meets your micronutrient requirements, it probably won't do anything.

QFT. I carry a multi when I travel in places where my food supply is unreliable, but they're otherwise bullshizzle.

“Most people do not do, but take refuge in theory and talk, thinking that they will become good in this way” -- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.4

Why? I thought IV Vitamin C was an accepted therapy for surgery recovery. It seemed a reasonable extension to try it to improve healing from injuries as well.

Vitamin C is administered at levels of 100-300mg/day to patients who are being fed parenterally. This is intended to meet their normal nutritional requirements, not therapeutically.

If there is a generally-accepted protocol for administering therapeutic/pharmacological doses of Vitamin C post-operation, I am unaware of it.

Intravenous administration is especially troublesome for two reasons:
1) It circumvents the body's natural mechanism for regulating Vitamin C intake (diarrhea)
2) My understanding is that a single administration of Vitamin C will only have a transient effect on serum levels (see this graph). There are time-released vitamin C tablets available, but causing a prolonged increase in serum levels via IV would require your husband to haul an IV tree around all day.

Originally Posted by Office Party Barbie

The guy I see is a registered Naturopathic Doctor (a professional designation in Ontario)

Naturopathic Doctors, despite the name and professional designation (I've got one too), are not medical doctors.

There are no naturopathic doctors in Ontario who are licensed medical doctors.

who compounded the vitamin blend specifically for CdnPaddy's state of heath and needs. We didn't find anything wierd or quackish about the therapy, except the part where it didn't actually do anything.

If the naturopath drew blood, tested serum ascorbic acid levels, and found them to be significantly below 70 µmol/L, then I withdraw my objection. Otherwise, unless they had damn good reason to induce a short-lived spike in serum ascorbic acid levels, they should have scrapped the IV and sent you to the nearest Walmart.

Re: Jack Skellington's post... agreed that Vitamin D is a reasonable intervention for SAD. The theory makes a lot of sense, and if nothing else, it's unlikely to do any harm. Oral Vitamin D sources/supplements are cheap, the body can readily inactivate excess amounts, and as you noted, the RDI is probably too low (given that I drink between two and four litres of fortified milk a day, I'm getting somewhere around your order of magnitude extra).

I'm not sure how good the first study is - it's not blinded, and it's not controlled as tightly as I'd like (the phototherapy group may function as a rudimentary control, but that depends on the details of their treatment). I'm puzzling over what this means...

It should also be noted that "appears" isn't strictly true - this paper is describing a hypothesis - published in a journal named "Medical Hypotheses" - so it'd be more accurate to say that it's been hypothesized.

Don't forget to get some quality outdoors time in, even if you can only do it on the weekend. My wife was suffering the effects of SAD and the most effective thing for her was outdoor physical activity during the day. She's fine all winter as long as she takes her multi and I drag her out of the house once a week to go snowshoeing or cross country skiing.

That's a much better read - thanks for posting it. (Apparently I have a crush on you... awkward!)

The bit about hypervitaminosis A masking vitamin D is especially bothersome... I've been trying to avoid overdosing on retinol, but it's hard when preformed retinol is added to milk and present in multivitamins. I don't see why they don't just stick with beta carotene in the multis - all the benefits without the risks.